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Monday, April 23, 2012

Kelly Childs is our Vegan, Gluten-Free Goddess (& Recipe)

Guest blogs are back in action today. Thank you all for your patience as we took some time off from our regular scheduled posts to honor my husband, Robert Kennedy.

To kick things off right we have Kelly Childs of Kindfood and GFV Baking Co. She's a knockout gluten-free, vegan chef who works incredibly hard to make healthy food delicious. Kelly has even provided us with the recipe to her famous Buddha Bowl! Yum!

Take it away Kelly...

Kelly at work!

Are you living your life yet!

My philosophy for attaining optimal health and living a happy, passionate life have always encompassed the three most important things to achieve this:
1. Diet
2. Diet
3. Diet

And I don’t mean ‘diet’ to lose weight; I mean ‘diet’ as a lifestyle that creates YOUR LIFE.
I’ve always believed that the foundation to a healthy lifestyle is nutrition, then comes working out and then comes your genes you were blessed with at birth. Surprisingly, genes account for only 2%- 3% of disease in our population, so why the surge in chronic conditions like obesity, diabetes, cancer, coronary heart disease, etc. Our diet. Whole food plant-based nutrition gives you so much more macro-nutrients and micro-nutrients than you ever dreamed possible and your body will thank you for giving it what it has been craving for years.

Tosca Reno’s book, the Eat-Clean Diet Cookbook Vegetarian gets it right. She is a total advocate for non-processed, whole food nutrition and I love it! EATING CLEAN is the secret to perfect health and now Tosca is promoting her veggies too. We’ve clobbered ourselves for decades with processed fast food and too much animal protein and this book brings you easily back to the kitchen and relearn the most basic foundation to our health and losing weight naturally.

As a whole food, plant-based eating vegan for over 4 years now, I can vouch for the improvement in my health through eliminating all processed food and animal products and feeling fantastic. I’ve never looked better, my skin glows, I have abs, I have an abundance of energy and my sleep is remarkably deep. Remember this: you ARE what you eat.

This recipe is so easy!! There’s no excuses to try this best seller out from Kindfood and the GFV Baking Co. The benefits of eating brown rice are notoriously good. In a strict macrobiotic or vegetarian diet, it is considered the primary source of sustenance.

Make organic brown rice according to the packaging. (I would suggest using 3 cups of brown rice to 6.5 cups of spring water and this will make you plenty). This should take about 45 minutes of cooking time or pre-cook the rice the night before and simply warm up the rice in a skillet when needed.

Slice and then quarter the sweet potato and place in a hot skillet to cook and brown. Grill for about 5 minutes until brown. Keep warm. (You can also lay out the sweet potato on a baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes)

Once rice is cooked, divide the hot brown rice between 4 large soup bowls.

Now this is the easy part:
1. Drizzle the olive oil and the tamari over the rice bowls. (1 tbsp on each bowl and ½ tbsp tamari- to personal taste)
2. Sprinkle the bowls evenly with dried basil. (1/2 tsp on each bowl)
3. Top with diced tomatoes and diced red onions. (1 tbsp on each bowl)
4. Lay about 6-7 pieces of sweet potato over each bowl. (1 tbsp on each bowl)
5. Scatter with chopped fresh cilantro over top. (1 tbsp on each bowl)
6. Now sprinkle 1 tbsp of sunflower seeds on each bowl.
7. About 7 raw almonds are now placed on each rice bowl.
8. Garnish with about 3 slices of avocado and sunflower sprouts on each bowl.

This is your simplest dinner ever! It also keeps well for a brown bag lunch to be eaten at work or at school.